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30.05.07
Daiwa Scholars book
We’ve just finished this commemorative catalogue for the Daiwa foundation, celebrating their 100th Anglo-Japanese scholar, for an event in Tokyo. The relatively normal looking book takes a surreal turn when you slide the belly band off and realise that the first ‘0’ of a downwards reading ‘100’ is ram punched throughout the 120 page brochure. 
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27.05.07
Children helping Save the Children
Johnson banks were appointed in the middle of 2006 to help Save the Children in the UK raise their profile. Save the Children has become slightly forgotten in UK charity circles, and want to be the energetic worldwide voice for children’s rights they once were in the early 20th century. They’d found that, even with a name like theirs, people would still ask them ‘what do you do?’ A lot of discussion around their purpose and positioning followed, and in late ’06 a far more ‘agit’ stance was signed off by their board. Our task was then how to translate this into a new visual approach, whilst staying close to the global guidelines which centred around their ‘outstretched arms’ child symbol and the use of Gill Sans. After some successful experimentation with versions of Gill that we had roughened up a little and hand-drawn, we had the breakthrough thought - let’s ask children to save the children. So we developed a worksheet that we tested then distributed round London schools, which contained light outlines of Gill, and asked children to do their own version. Here’s an excerpt from the worksheet. 
This is an excerpt from one of the font pages. 
Some kids only managed to draw a symbol. Some managed two weights (including numerals and punctuation - very impressive). 
By mid February we had hundreds of examples. We then selected 14 weights and pleaded with Monotype (the original punch cutters for Gill’s original) to not only give the project their blessing, but to help digitise the new versions. Luckily they agreed. 
Now we have the digital versions and we’re beginning to see how the fonts will work in everyday communication. It’s very useful having 14 weights of Gill, not just 3, like before. 
The fonts will be used in all of Save the Children UK’s collateral from now on, and a campaign identity has been developed for the UK which aims to make it it perfectly clear what they do, and how others can get involved. 
Hopefully, soon, it will become impossible for someone to ask Save the Children what they do. It will be obvious.
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26.05.07
Don’t blame me
There’s a bit of (probably justified) chatter in cyberspace about one of this year’s D&AD Gold awards, the project for the Misereor War Orphans charity. Creative Review has already despaired of its ‘wearying use of pastiche and platitudinous message’. Ouch. 
All I can say, as one of the D&AD Gold judges (who look at all the nominations for silver and vote accordingly) is that we were shown the image like this, without type and asked to judge it as an illustration for a war orphans organisation. A job it does pretty powerfully, and there was a lot of positive discussion on the day about this piece.
Trouble is, once you see it with the slightly dodgy type and awful logo (which we didn’t), it doesn’t look as great, does it? And you start to judge it as an ad, not a picture. What a difference some type makes. 
Anyway, I’d already voted, slightly embarrassingly, for a great music video that didn’t even win a silver (oops) and had my money on the rather brilliant Wii winning gold (which it didn’t). Don’t let anyone ever tell you that D&AD is predictable. Michael Johnson
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25.05.07
150 Grafiks
Last night saw the launch of a little book to celebrate the 150th issue of UK design journal, Grafik. 150 designers were asked to write a short piece and provide an image of what inspires them. 
Michael Johnson’s is reproduced below: “Mine is an odd type of inspiration. I don’t quite know why but I’ve become completely obsessed with the way flocks of birds fly together. The way they twist and turn, in almost perfect unison, I find one of the most amazing sights you could ever see. One day I hope I’ll persuade someone to adopt a design style that twists and turns almost constantly, and when I see birds turning like this I’m inspired to keep trying.” 
Photo by Nikontiger/istock
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22.05.07
Portfolio questions, answered
This recent degree show mailer from a college featured a misspelt name badge for the johnson banks creative director and an inch mark in the headline. Double-bad, you might say. It prompted us to dig out this questionnaire we recently filled out for our friends at Under Consideration.
How many student portfolios do you see in a month? Or in a year?
We get a lot of applications for placements and internships each week, and at graduation time a truly vast amount of applications for jobs. It’s actually quite rare that we see many of the physical portfolios because we’ve had to put in processes to weed out the duff applications. By the time we see the actual person and their work, we’re usually hoping they’re going to work out.
What would you advise a student do (or not do) when designing and producing their portfolio?
Well, it strikes us that the digital form of the folio has now taken on paramount importance. We’re much happier clicking through a straightforward pdf of greatest hits or a simple click-through website than having to waste time hearing about someone’s issues with their typography tutor or how they passed their cycling proficiency test. By pre-vetting, electronically, it speeds things up massively.
What do you look for in a student portfolio?
Ideas, followed by great ideas, then more great ideas. We can teach people how to use the design programmes - it seems much harder to teach people how to have the ideas in the first place.
How many pieces would you say make the perfect portfolio?
In the digital realm, once we’ve been persuaded to open the pdf or visit the URL, a dozen or so pieces works best for us. Generally students very rarely have more than ten killer ideas. In fact, if we’re honest, it’s quite rare to see anyone with more than 4 or 5. Trouble is, we’re suspicious if people only show us 6 projects – we start thinking ‘where’s all the other stuff then’?
And what kind of project should be included/excluded? Do you like seeing personal projects, school projects, gig posters? Or none of the above?
We think students should be using college time to be pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in graphic design, so we’re not terribly interested in the dodgy logo for the local hairdresser or tacky gig flyers (unless they are brilliant). If someone’s work is entirely personal, conceptual, ‘out there’ work, then if it’s amazing we might take a punt – that’s when the placement/intern system works well for us because we can see how someone whose mind is open can handle the day-to-day realities of graphic design. The colleges that stuff vocational, ‘real world’ projects down their students don’t get much support from us because they seem to have closed themselves too early. They develop an inability to think outside the box and that is a real pain... we have to undo all their preconceptions when they start work properly.
Tell us about the most memorable portfolio you have encountered
Well, we were approached by a very good student with a really lovely, simple, click through website stuffed with fantastic work (ie definitely over 6 and maybe 12 killers). That was the best over the last few years. Trouble is when they came on placement, we found out that this person was a bit odd, to say the least, and in a small studio, personality is a real issue… We have in the past received some lovely little books of work, which can also work because they’re tough to chuck in the bin.
What would you say are the most common mistakes?
Well the big turn-offs for us are spelling names wrong (for heavens sake MICHAEL JOHNSON is pretty easy to spell) or calling Michael Michael BANKS (duh), or a cv littered with spelling mistakes. One is forgivable, any more is just plain lazy. We’re really not fans of unjustified over-confidence, so the ‘I think johnson banks would really benefit from my incredible, unique approach’ kind of thing goes down like a lead balloon here. Huge and unwieldy server smashing pdfs are a bit of a drag too, as are overly complex and over-engineered websites (We’re judging people on their ideas, not their ‘flash rollover’ coding skills). We’ll very rarely put a student CD Rom in our machines now after various horrendous crashes caused by dodgy ones. Being a digital smart-arse is all well and good, but if you do it, make sure it’s brilliant.
Please tell us a little bit about your portfolio review process Two of us handle the enquiries. We sieve them with pdfs and websites, the people we think are possibilities get an interview, the good ones come on placement. Sometimes the good colleges send us their stars on placement before they graduate so we get ‘first-look’ at the good people. That’s very helpful to us. We’d never employ now without a placement/intern period first (ie ‘come and try us out for two months and we’ll see how it goes’). It also gives them the chance to see what they think of us, as well. What was your first portfolio like? What did you learn from it? Do you still have it? ‘My first folio was appalling’ (says Michael). ‘I’d done a ‘marketing and visual art’ degree which left me with half a portfolio, mainly consisting of dodgy two colour posters for the local theatre group and college art gallery. Really, really awful. Unsurprisingly I couldn’t get a job anywhere, even if I offered to pay them, not vice versa. Not long after I travelled the world looking for work and kept my projects on 35mm slides, which was again a nightmare because no one could ever be bothered to project them. So my entire early career was based on people trying to judge my work by peering at tiny glass slides. I noticed that I started to design projects that would work well that small – still quite a good rule when you think about it, and I still catch myself wondering ‘what would it look like on slide…’
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22.05.07
Bizarre
We’ve been involved in the D&AD Congress this week, running a session yesterday at the award nominations exhibition on ‘why these things were nominated’. Unbeknownst to us D&AD’s resident illustrator decided to blog this in her own unique way, here and here. Funny.
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18.05.07
That’s quite a thank you
Thank you’s from clients can take all forms. Sometimes no news is a kind of thank you (it means nothing’s gone wrong). More conventionally we’ve had flowers, chocolates, film tickets, guitars, you name it really. But this one really takes the prize. We finished our first tranche of work for the charity Living Paintings a few weeks ago, but they’d been suspiciously quiet. Now we know why - they’d been laboriously hand-painting individual ‘art’ labels for a case of Bollinger which spells out thank you. They’ve also done a spoof johnson banks home page label too. Genius. Seems a shame to drink it really.
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17.05.07
A quick project for the Science Museum
We got a call a few weeks ago from the Science Museum to help them with ‘some graphics’ for a little exhibition. As is often the way, one panel led to another, and what was billed as a graphic ‘wall’ became a series of huge machine-cut flattened pill packs as we tried to explain the history of Penicillin. Tricky, but worth it.
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16.05.07
More envelopes
What’s encouraging about this year’s Christian Aid week is that the other agencies involved are starting to bring the envelope idea to life in ads, and on the web. We’ve posted below the rather nice ads developed by ad agency Shop that demonstrate how the envelope can turn into something completely different, and below that, stills from an animation on the web where the envelope unfolds, stage by stage. It’s starting to look like a brand idea that works in print, advertising and on the web. Interesting.
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14.05.07
The envelope comes to life
This week in the UK it’s Christian Aid Week. When we started work on their identity nearly two years ago we were almost painfully aware of how important the week is to them as an organisation. In the end, the more we thought about it, the more we realised that 17,500,000 envelopes arriving on doorsteps across the country was ‘media placement’ that was too good to ignore. So the new identity simply derived itself from an envelope shape. It’s taken a while to get going, but use of the envelope in lots of different ways has really begun to take hold. So our work for this year’s campaign (shown below) is based on the idea of the envelope becoming a gro-bag out of which orange trees can sprout. Compared to where they were just a couple of years ago (with the traditional black and white dour pictures of starving people) this is quite a step forward.
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10.05.07
The V&A’s birthday
We’ve just produced this image for a special book celebrating the V&A’s up-and-coming 150th anniversary. We wanted something odd, beautiful and a little bit spooky. In collaboration with photographer Richard Maxted.
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08.05.07
All identity schemes wobble, eventually
The Gilbert and George exhibition at Tate Modern closed yesterday. Apart from being the biggest exhibition of G&G work ever assembled, it was also notable for the fact that none of the publicity featured the Tate logo. By our reckoning this was the first time this has happened to a scheme which until now has been carefully controlled. Intrigued by this we asked the Tate’s press office for their view - they replied ‘The title of the exhibition is Gilbert & George: Major Exhibition Tate Modern which clearly incorporates the venue. It was not felt necessary to repeat this information on the poster’. That’s a fair point, but we’re willing to bet it also had something to do with G&G’s legendary desire to be closely involved in every item associated with them. It’s true that the fuzzy logo might have looked quite odd in the brutal environment of G&G’s approach to type. Some people think that all identity schemes eventually find their breaking point. Maybe Tate has just found theirs?
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02.05.07
Design education, from an ingenuous perspective
In many respects I’m completely unqualified to write about design education. I didn’t attend a fashionable design course. I didn’t do foundation. My first job was as a design consultant, not a designer (having failed to get into advertising as a planner). I never knew the RCA existed until my mid-twenties (having assumed it was still a car breakdown service). Pretty hopeless really.
You could quite easily argue that someone who effectively taught themselves graphic design by reading the only 3 books on the subject in the library (Pioneers of Modern Typography, Milton Glaser Graphic Design and Megg’s History of Graphic Design, in case you’re interested) was a johnny-come-lately who lacked the true understanding to get anywhere.
For some time I would have agreed with you. Alan Fletcher once called me ‘ingenuous’ (which I had to look up, being more familiar with ‘disingenous’), and then I realised that being ‘candid and free from reserve’ wasn’t so bad after all. Bit by bit, I’ve come to see that being initially ignorant to many aspects of the profession was, in a way, a blessing.
By my mid twenties, I had begun visiting degree shows on behalf of my then employers with my eyes open, not shackled by any sense of alumni loyalty, or aware of any reputations that needed bolstering. In fact I went to all the significant graphic design degree shows with my eyes wide open for at least a decade.
Now I’m an external examiner so I have less time, but I still like to get out and see what people are up to. We need an influx of good students every year or two - we may not be able to employ all the good ones but we’d like to mentally log at least some of the great graduates from each year group.
I’ve come to realise, over 20 years as an employer, that my search for designers who can dig at the design coal-face never changes. I need fantastic brains, bursting with ideas and the skills to get some of them down on paper. A sense of humour helps. As does a love of music (a continual feature of life here). It helps that they can stand up for their own ideas if they think the boss has got it wrong. It helps if they can see that the last 5% spent crafting can turn the merely ‘great’ to truly ‘fantastic’. And they need to understand that the search for great could take 9.5 of the 10 days, leaving only hours to mock up the favourite. (But what a favourite it will be).
Personally I’ve always adhered to the Miles Davis approach – always hire people younger than you and better than you. I never really went for that ‘here’s my idea now work it up’ bully-boy school of art direction - the best idea gets worked up, whether it was done by the cleaner or scribbled by the placement. (Actually I haven’t yet had a cleaner supply anything close to a decent idea, but I live in hope)
So ‘all of the above’ is what I hope the design colleges will instill in their students. A reluctance to boil graphic design to a few well-thumbed and clichéd source books. A relentless search for the new, you might say.
In theory, anyone from anywhere, with enough good work and the right amount of chutzpah could get a job with us. And I’d like to think we’re not ‘college specific’, but I fear over the years we’ve tended to gravitate towards the usual suspects, sorry. I also like to think that I would give the 21-year-old M.Johnson a chance at johnson banks were he to (by some bizarre piece of time-travelling) apply for a job here, but I fear I would now look at the dodgy folio of 2 colour posters for the local drama club and swiftly show him the door. Harsh, eh?
I could give you a list of the degree shows to visit this summer and guarantee you’ll see something to make you re-think how graphic design ‘should’ be done. OK, it’s fair to say that with the rise of student numbers you ’ll have to do more sifting, but the gems are still there if you prospect hard enough. The course I’m currently external on, at Kingston, has nearly tripled its students compared to two decades ago. Then there were three 1sts, last year there were ten: in many respects quality seems to be proportional.
Perhaps my focus on excellence is a bit myopic, but I expect the best courses to produce outstanding students now that thousands compete for hundreds of jobs. There are things I’d change a little - the various student competitions are useful for benchmarking but if all we see are hundreds of solutions to one brief, it can get a little tedious. Do the best competitions then devote some brain space to original thinking, that’s my tip. And I worry for all those tutors – there may be three times as many students but I never seem to spot three times as many tutors, do you?
But back to where I started. From my simplistic viewpoint, as long as the students remain some of the best in the world, then the system is doing its job. For me, at least.
This is an adaptation of an article written for New Design magazine by Michael Johnson
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01.05.07
Things to make you go ahhh...
Beginning a new series of things that we find inspirational, here’s one for starters. Now you might be wondering how anyone could find a bag of cement on their doorstep even vaguely inspiring. But wait, this is Blue Circle cement. A brand identity so strong it doesn’t even have to write its name - all it has to do is put that device on its products. Fantastic. If only all identity design were this simple.
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